What Is Permaculture?

“Permaculture is a design system that gives us a more balanced life aligned with Nature, we know that we have a well designed system when we have more co-operation, less stress and more fun, when we are eating good food grown in our own community, when we are paying less taxand when we are having more quality time off and celebrating life, these are all by products of good design where we are ultimately surrounded by Natural Abundance” Paul Taylor

Permaculture provides the framework for an overarching and complex design system for everything in life. Every component of our world and aspect of our lives isin relationship with every other component and aspect and each has multiple functions. It is the links between elements that is a primary aspect of Permaculture, when the functions of elements are linked; it saves energy and turns random elements into integrated systems with mutualistic benefits.

After extensive and thoughtful observation and analysis we can produce permaculture designs that take account of and plot the components of our lives and environment. Key design elements are drawn from: the landscape; our climate; our dwellings; our infrastructure; our communities; our co-operations, our primary relationships and our living practises. In Permaculture individual components are mapped in such an order and alignment so as to produce maximum efficiency and production with the least energy loss of any type in both the short and long term.“Careful observation gives us information and knowledge, when we apply knowledge to our system it becomes a more intelligently designed system, each element in the system benefits from the application of knowledge gained by observation. We know we have achieved an intelligently designed system when it becomes less stressed and more productive, ultimately this means that our human relationships are less stressed and more abundant, this is the intention of good design”. Paul Taylor

A Permaculture design continually evolves as the elements within it change, so rather than ever arriving at a completed picture, it’s something that is dynamic, like Nature.

Permaculture design systems reflect the patterns of undisturbed nature. For humans it requires often a change of perspective to make a conscious alliance with Nature and adhere to Natural Principles.The spread and adoption of Permaculture as an underlying reference, and code for how humans conduct their lives provides the most likely assurance that we will continue to survive as a species on this earth and ultimately live as a celebration of life in balance with the environment surrounding us.

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren founded Permaculture in Tasmania in the late (leave out ‘late’) 70’s. It has since become arguably Australia’s greatest intellectual export with current estimates at 1 million plus practitioners worldwide. We are greening deserts using Permaculture principles, and closer to home certainly you can live more efficiently and enjoyably by simply modifying a few of the ways you have learned to live.Whether you’re a householder, a back yard gardener, a farmer or you run a corporation you can achieve higher production levels and input cost reductions sustainably by applying Permaculture practises. There is plenty of evidence that support this claim. Living ecologically doesn’t mean giving everything up, relearning the value of nature and understanding there are many roads to being wealthy and discovering what being wealthy means for you.

A broader scale adoption of Permaculture Principles will provide the way toward a sustainableand a more intelligentfuture for the world, a way of correcting a world that you could say is currently wobbling out of alignment seemingly unnoticed by most its growing population.

At its core Permaculture is founded on 3 ethics: Earth Care; People Care; Fair Share and 12 principleswhich relate to each other and are all considered when placing elements into a Permaculture design.